LibreOffice

FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH MICROSOFT SUITE

LIBREOFFICE IS SO good, you’ll wonder why you ever paid for office software. It’s compatible with all Microsoft document formats, and has almost every feature you’ll find in the latest versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

The open source suite contains six programs to cover every common office task: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. The last three are tools you won’t find in many other free office suites, and are designed for vector diagrams, mathematical functions and databases, respectively. The latter is particularly useful; free alternatives to Microsoft Access are hard to find. There’s a great selection of extensions and templates to make it even more flexible, and it’s free for businesses as well as home users. LibreOffice’s component programs don’t have the ribbon-based interface that’s been part of Microsoft Office since 2007. Instead, the open source office suite uses a more traditional system of icons and toolbars. That’s no bad thing – the old-school interface means no tools are hidden behind tabs with unhelpful names, and you can navigate easily using a keyboard rather than a mouse if you prefer. The open source suite lacks Office’s built-in cloud storage option, but that’s easily remedied by installing the Dropbox desktop software, which gives you instant access to your account as though it was a folder on your PC.

LibreOffice is a fork of Apache OpenOffice, and the two are extremely similar, but we’d opt for LibreOffice thanks to its more frequent update schedule and more modern interface.